


Soulmate Flowers

by Lilian



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 14:49:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17408927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilian/pseuds/Lilian
Summary: Whenever your soulmate touches you, flowers bloom on your skin. Snarry.





	Soulmate Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> I don't remember where I got the idea from for this fic, but it's definitely not mine. A million thanks to hippocrates460 for being a snarry champion. :)

_Year 1_

Harry sits between Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger on the Hogwarts Express, and watches as their palms simultaneously develop colourful flowers. Like small, intricate tattoos. Magic is awesome.

The sudden awkwardness and the gaping prompts him to ask about it. Ron stutters out a half-hearted explanation that Hermione expands into something more understandable. It seems like they’re complementing each other perfectly already. Soulmates. Harry finds the idea exciting and a little scary – who would want him as a soulmate? Uncle Vernon’s words about his worthlessness are hard to forget.

When Draco Malfoy offers a hand to him later, he pushes it away hesitantly. Nothing happens in the following minutes, nor when he gets introduced to Neville Longbottom properly a half an hour later.

After the sorting ceremony, the glorious feast and the moving staircases and the talking paintings and the view! The view outside of his room! Harry meets Seamus and Dean. His skin remains the same, but he doesn’t really mind. It’s an exciting game.

The next morning, Seamus and Dean notice the little blocks of tulips that bloomed on their wrists overnight. They show Harry and Ron and Neville, and it’s pretty different than how Ron’s and Hermione’s looked, but no less beautiful.

The pattern on Ron’s palm disappeared, but he explains that it’s expected. As soon as he touches Hermione again, the flowers will come back, or very rarely, bloom somewhere else on his skin. Harry is fascinated and quizzes Ron about soulmates in his family, but they get distracted by going to get breakfast in a buzzing castle where something always happens.

As soon as they’ve settled down, then during breakfast, and immediately afterwards, other students approach Harry to touch him. Some blushing, asking for permission, some simply grabbing his hand for a quick shake. When a smaller crowd develops around their table, Professor McGonagall arrives to tell them not to harass Harry, which is good, because he was getting overwhelmed. Not a lot of people touched Harry in the last few years, and he doesn’t feel so good about the whole soulmate thing anymore. It looks like everybody wants a piece of him, just because he is famous for not dying when a Dark Wizard attacked him.

They go to classes, and Hogwarts is wonderful, McGonagall is strict, Flitwick is clever, Sprout is kind and Snape hates him. There are Quidditch and classes and the mystery of the Stone, and Harry is relieved beyond reason that Quirrell’s skin burned up at his touch instead of blooming flowers.

_Year 2_

For about a month, everyone thinks Harry is Slytherin’s heir. Students cross to the other side of the hallway to avoid accidentally getting in contact with him.

It should be a relief, and still, somehow, Harry feels worse.

_Year 3_

Sirius Black and Professor Lupin are soulmates. Maybe it makes sense that they were both kind to Harry, but they both have to leave.

_Year 4_

Most of the people around Harry paired up already. Or in the case of the Neville-Ginny-Luna-Draco whatever that was, simply found their soulmates. Malfoy, who spent the last year incredibly stressed out about his thing with Neville and Luna, finally started to behave normally again. Luna took the whole three soulmates thing in stride, citing that the Four Founders were in a similar situation. (Hermione insisted that this wasn’t a fact supported by any written evidence, but she did so quietly after Ginny ‘talked’ to her.) Neville fretted about how to tell his grandmother. Ginny was mostly interested in playing Quidditch, so she took care of the whole thing with a shrug.

People still approached Harry, especially at the beginning of each year. He was rarely in the mood anymore to allow these touches, and his friends tried to shield him as much as possible. The foreign students arriving for the Triwizard Tournament created excitement among the single students, but Harry only dreaded the influx of strangers who’d look for a potential mate in him.

That year, he touches Colin, Cho and Victor Krum and Fleur and Cedric, in the end. Pettigrew and Voldemort take his arm and press on his scar respectively, but the knowledge that regardless of Trelawney’s prophecy or the twin wands, neither are his soulmates doesn’t console him. His life sucks, soulmate-less or not.

_Year 5_

Harry sags against the wall, three floors from Snape’s office and the Pensive. The memory he just witnessed was… He rubs at his arm. Snape gripped it so tightly he wouldn’t be surprised if it because bruised. He looks at it to check, and for a second, can’t believe his eyes. He blinks once, twice, and stares dumbly at the white petals that cover his upper arm so thickly that they almost make his brown skin disappear under it.

Right. Harry swallows, fighting the urge to throw up. Snape. Soulmate.

 

Hours pass with him panicking, rubbing at his skin and thinking frantically, right there on the floor.

Everything turns on its axis. Snape is on their side, he must be, now that Harry is proven to be his Soulmate. Soulmates can’t truly hurt each other, that’s one of the first things they learned about them. Even without knowing, Snape protected him before, or at least tried to, according to Dumbledore.

Harry’s father was just as arrogant as Snape said. It doesn’t make it right, how Snape treated Harry, but it all makes sense now, even if it’s still not fair. So Snape is not a liar, not completely.

He needs to talk to him.

Never be said that Gryffindors weren’t brave.

He walks back as if walking to his death, but he’s stiff with the determination that he’ll resolve the situation somewhat.  
He knocks, and hears ‘come in’. Snape is standing with his back turned, staring down at something, not looking in Harry’s direction despite his entry and the sound of the door closing behind Harry.

“I wanted to apologise.”

Harry waits, breath held back, but his professor gives no indication of having heard him. He tries again.

“Professor Snape, I’m really sorry. Um. Have you seen---?”

Snape turns around slowly. His face is expressionless, but his eyes focus immediately on Harry’s arm. The unmistakable flowers there. Snape’s right hand is curled into a fist, but Harry can still see the brown edge of the petals peeking out here and there.

Harry knows that he’s holding back a tremendous temper when he snaps:

“You can’t tell anyone about this. Not even the Headmaster.” Harry gasps, but Snape is not done. “We need to resume your Occlumency lessons as well. The Dark Lord cannot find out--”

“Why?” Harry demands.

Snape seems to lose whatever control he had, exploding at him:

“Because you’re putting my life at risk, child!”

Harry steps back involuntarily.

“You mean...”

“Do you think there would be any opportunity for spying had he discovered.. this?” Snape asks cuttingly, sarcastically, waving his guilty hand at Harry. “As things are, your mind is so weak, so unprotected, he can read it out of it without any difficulty...”

True, Harry was shit at Occlumency, but that wasn’t just his fault.

“I’m not lazy, I just don’t understand, okay? I can’t empty my mind, I don’t know how to do it, and there is just so much homework and those books are really hard to make sense of, and I…”

“Enough,” Snape quiets him. “I will attempt to find a solution. For tonight, you’re getting a sleeping potion.”

He spells the Pensive away before he goes to retrieve the vial.  
He also brings out a salve that gets rid of the flowers.  
Harry wishes he could keep them, just as long as he could commit them to memory, but doesn’t dare to ask Snape, who is terrifyingly quiet. The cold paste stings a little, but it gets rid of the marks as easily as water washes away drawings in the sand.

“Come back tomorrow straight after your last class. Bring your books. If anyone asks, tell them you did something extremely stupid and got yourself detention for the rest of the months.”

Harry, for once, doesn’t argue with him.

*

Occlumency is hard, and it doesn’t help Harry’s concentration, the revelation. Snape. Snape. Snape is on his mind constantly, twisting his emotions into different shapes like shadows on a wall. Of course, there are people without soulmates, without flowers blooming all over their bodies. As far as Wizarding society is aware, it doesn’t have a bad medical influence on you, if you never meet them. There is no other use to them beyond the superficial. You can live your whole life ignoring the fact that there is someone in the world who is in some way more in tune with your soul than others. But people wear their marks with pride. It’s regarded as something incredibly attractive, something that everyone desires to have.

Snape is mostly unchanged, he acts the same way around Harry in class and still grills him tirelessly to defend his mind. They meet every evening, and there seems to be no progress at all. In private, Snape abstains from shouting at him once Harry tells him it unsettles him. He is no less angry, but without being loud, Harry recognises his emotions for what they truly are: desperation, fear.

Harry tries harder to learn Occlumency, but until that happens, he gets sleeping solutions every evening, and Snape develops mind-shielding potions for daytime. They agree on keeping both Dumbledore and Voldemort in the dark about this – Snape tells them Harry suddenly had a breakthrough and is the best Occlumens he’s ever met, a natural talent – the Headmaster is pleased, the Dark Lord furious – and they both believe him.

Snape never touches Harry. The vials he hands over to Harry are always extended as far from his body as possible, most of the time magically hovering in front of him. Harry sleeps better with them than he has in a long while. His grades improve because of that, but not his Occlumency. His mood also suffers from spending so much time with Snape, but not all of his influence is bad – he studies more, becomes more attentive, observant.

By the end of the year, they mostly got over their squabbling, and their only fights happen in front of other people, in the classroom. Spending so much time together means that Harry got to know Snape, from his books to his tea preferences and it seems like a waste of time to hate him when he’s proven to be just a person instead of a hated professor.

Spending all those hours together also means spending less time with his peers. Hermione and Ron fall in love in his absence, and mind his absence less than they otherwise would.

Snape gives him a bigger dose of the Sleeping Potion at the end of the year. He also hands him his home address and orders him to write when he runs out.

 

Harry spends the whole summer berating himself for not asking for a quick touch to observe the flowers that would bloom on their skin.

 

Puberty hits Harry hard. After spending a miserable week with the Dursleys, he’s allowed to join Sirius at Grimmauld Place.  
They have a very awkward conversation about sex, amongst other things. Harry drills him (them, when Remus is around too) about his parents at Hogwarts, carefully asking the right questions to get onto the bottom of things without bringing Snape into it.

Sirius does eventually tell him about that memory, and the one where they almost killed him, and Harry, in turn, confesses the whole Soulmate thing to him. He has spent so much time thinking about confiding in him, but in the end, he just loses his patience when his godfather starts to besmirch Severus for the eighth time in the same conversation.

Sirius’s head almost explodes at the news, and it takes several days for him to make his reluctant peace with it.

But he doesn’t actively pick on Snape on the next Order Meeting, going as far as simply walking away when Severus mocks him, and that, of course, makes Snape suspicious.

“Did you tell him?” He asks Harry quietly when they are standing alone in the kitchen later.

“Yes, I did.” Harry holds his furious gaze bravely. “But I made him swear not to reveal it to anyone else.”

It looks like Snape is trying to breathe fire without actually turning into a dragon.

“You had no right to--”

“It can be good for us that someone knows about your loyalties besides Dumbledore,” Harry reasons, interrupting him. He thought about this a lot, and he has plenty of reasons to convince Snape.

But the man just huffs angrily and leaves him alone with the washing up.

_Year 6._

After more than one and a half years, they conclude that Harry will not be able to learn Occlumency. Luckily, by this time, Snape developed so much different mind-shielding and sleeping potions, that Harry is sure he could write a book about it. He is a very competent Potions Master, Harry never suffers any side effects or seems to get addicted to any of them – though they change the rota to make extra certain that never happens.

It’s hard to leave Sirius and Remus at the end of the summer. They’re the closest thing Harry has to a family, not counting Ron and Hermione.

His best friends arrive to the train station hand in hand, almost every visible inch of them covered in flowers, and Harry feels achingly jealous.

Harry wants flowers for himself too. He wants to see what would develop on his skin. The Snape part doesn’t matter anymore. Sure, it would be a lot better if his soulmate would be someone more pleasant, but funnily, time spent in Snape’s presence and effort spent into talking Sirius off his murder meant he got used to the fact that it’s Snape. The decision that they stop trying to get Harry to develop his Occlumency takes out all the remaining tension of their time together.

After the Halloween celebrations, when he feels the loneliness beginning to swallow him, he hides under the cloak and goes to Snape’s office.

Snape no longer seems dismayed when he sees him. He is more worried since they didn’t arrange a meeting for that night.

“Did you run out of a potion?” He demands quietly after he closed and warded the door behind him.

“No,” Harry takes a deep breath. “I want a flower.”

Snape looks at him as if he suddenly developed four more set of ears. Then his face darkens.

“If this is a joke...” He threatens.

“It’s not,” Harry promises, talking quickly to prevent Snape from taking points or kicking him out. “I thought about it, and if you touch your elbow to my stomach, we will both be able to hide it. Or if you want to get rid of yours, that’s fine. But I want mine.”

Snape looks at him searchingly, clearly not comprehending what on earth he came up with.

“Why?”

Harry shrugs carefully.

“I just want to see.”

“Why?” Snape presses on.

“I’m curious.” Somewhere along the line, it became easier to be completely honest with Snape than with literally everyone else. “Because it doesn’t hurt either of us, but it could be something pretty. Because I want to feel like I’m included for once. Like I belong.”

Snape seems almost scared. If it’s Harry’s words or the fact that he took a step closer to where he’s sitting, he doesn’t know. It’s a very well-constructed reasoning, he knows, but then again, he had a whole summer to think about it.

“It is inappropriate for a teacher to touch a student,” Snape protests weakly.

“We’re soulmates,” Harry reminds him. The word hangs heavily between them in the air. Harry wonders if any of them ever acknowledged it aloud, and finds he doesn’t remember. “Besides, it’s not one of the most intimate parts of the body. Or are you gonna be thinking inappropriate things while you do it?”

Snape goes horribly red, and Harry almost smiles as he splutters:

“Potter! No!”

“Well, I might be now,” Harry says teasingly. He scarcely can believe his nerve, but Snape is still as read as a tomato, he’s avoiding his gaze and looks like he’d rather flee the room altogether. Which means there is no way he didn’t think about them, as Harry has, sweaty and naked and together and doing very adult stuff. It’s not really important now, however. He wants a flower first, so he decides to cut his professor some slack. “But it’s only because I’m a teenager, so don’t worry about it.”

Snape stands shakily when Harry arrives in front of his chair, and he hides his hands behind his back.

“No.” He says, but his voice breaks.

“Please.”

“Potter...”

“Please.”

Snape rolls his eyes desperately. He’s quiet for a very long time. Harry stands directly in front of him, and he wishes, he wishes fervently. Ever since that night when they found out, Snape never denied him anything. Never did anything to hurt him, tried to help wherever he could. So Harry, respectfully, won’t touch him without his consent, not even if the thought of seeing Snape’s tight jaw bloom full of flowers makes his blood hot.

“Half an hour,” Snape whispers hoarsely in the end. “Half an hour, here, then you use the paste before you leave.”

Harry agrees immediately.

He takes his robe off, and his sweater, and pulls up his shirt. Only when he’s done does he look back to Snape, who is watching him minutely. He sighs, then at Harry’s encouraging hand-motion, he slowly rolls up his sleeve. Harry notes he does this on his right arm.

“Are you absolutely sure you want this?” Snape demands when his arm is more or less freed.

“Yes. Completely. Please.”

Snape murmurs something about stupid Gryffindors, then quickly presses his elbow to Harry’s skin. The contact only lasts a second, as if Snape’s afraid Harry would burn him.

Then they both stare at his stomach, holding their breaths. Snape is still holding his bent arm up, suspended in the air between them. It takes an uncomfortably long time, although it must be only a minute or two before the patterns start to appear.

“Look!” Harry whispers excitedly, and Snape makes a small noise beside him. They stare, fascinated. It’s intricate, small, beautiful. The same white as it was the first time.

After a while, as if waking up from a spell, Snape moves back, breaking their intimate bubble. Harry follows him with his gaze as he staggers back to his chair while holding his arm away from him as if it was a foreign object. He sees how his gaze flutters towards it, and away every few seconds. How he tries to pretend he doesn’t care, and fails over and over again. He can’t pull it off completely, what with his mark being on his elbow.

Harry feels sorry for him for a second.

“Do you want one on your arm where you can see it better?”

Snape looks at the inside of his unblemished arm and pales. His gaze flies onto his other hand, and Harry realises what he’s thinking with a pang.

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

Snape doesn’t react to his words.

“But this is not the same,” Harry murmurs gently. “This is equal. It’s the same on your skin and on mine.”

Snape rolls his sleeve back and looks up at him. His eyes are strange, wide and stormy.

“I’d rather not.”

“Okay,” Harry allows and turns his gaze back on the mark on his stomach. “It’s really beautiful. Thank you.”

Snape doesn’t answer, but Harry feels his gaze on him on the back of his neck. They don’t talk more, but when the half hour is up, Snape doesn’t make him use the paste. Harry feels like he could burst open with happiness as he steals himself back into his dormitory.

*  
The tiny flower almost disappears by the morning and is completely gone by the time Harry’s first class is done, but he doesn’t mind. He will go back to ask for another one. In the same spot, to see if it would be the same flower or a different-looking one.

He wonders if Snape wiped away the one on his elbow or if he kept it as well until it slowly dissolved.

By the time the evening rolls around, Harry’s buzzing with excitement. When he finally gets down to the dungeons, however, Snape is not in his office. Nor is he in what Harry assumes (and the portrait next to the door confirms) is his private quarters.

He decides to come back the next day, but he can’t help but feel disappointed.

*  
Snape hides for a few more days until Harry finally successfully backs him into a corner. He never stood much of a chance with the Map on Harry’s side, but he avoided him long enough for Harry to be a bit impressed.

“What do you want?!” Severus barks at him, but his eyes betray him. Oh, he knows what’s happening, and Harry is sure he wants it too, that’s why he’s trying to run. That’s why he’s terrified.

“Another one.”

From then on, it’s a downhill battle.

*  
Harry realises Snape fell so desperately in love with the patterns as him almost immediately. It gets to a point where they start heated arguments in DADA over Defence against the dark arts subject matters, Snape’s teaching style, Harry’s father, Harry’s attitudes and Snape’s scorn and it’s so fake it’s laughable. The only point is that Harry gets himself believable detention, or gets called away before his longer breaks, where they can reverently touch skin to skin, watch each other and their own selves with a seemingly insatiable hunger. They hide their tracks as paranoid lovers. The whole thing resembles a forbidden romance, even a sexual relationship, except for the nature of their touches. It’s always just from the tip of their fingers to their elbow, (and very rarely on Harry’s abs.) For Snape, only on his right arm.

It’s intimate, like making art. Two fingertips stroking down gently in a swipe. A circle over the wrist. Harry starts dreaming of patterns, catches himself doodling the single spot where Snape has a small mole, the one that Harry always tries to make the middle of the blooming flower, but never quite successfully done so far.

It becomes an obsession. He sees Snape’s fingers itch as soon as he notices him in common places. They become adept at reading each other’s gazes seemingly overnight. Harry sometimes wakes in the night and gets the Map out to check on Snape. Once, when he is not in his quarters, but perhaps doing his share of the night rounds, and he is not too far away from the Tower, Harry slips into his shoes and puts on the cloak without a second of hesitation. If they touch now, the flowers will last until the morning, and he can wake up to seeing them again.

Snape doesn’t look particularly surprised to see him. He seems frail and weirdly out of his element in the wand light. Perhaps it’s that he’s not shouting anymore. Not besides in class, for show. Not at Harry.

It’s a heady thing, having a secret together. Harry starts thinking about him as Severus, his secret art project. His canvas, which only he is able to paint on. He never realised he was so interested in flowers, in nature, in art, but now he spends a substantial amount of his time reading about these topics in the library. He wants to capture the flowers, and has an idea one day when Colin starts his biweekly harassment of him with his camera.

He has a few awkward and untruthful conversations with Hermione and Ron about ordering things via owls, but at the end of the week, he is able to take pictures. Magical pictures.

They have a real fight about it in what feels like forever.  
The fight escalates into the old shit, the name-calling, the hurtful resentment, but is coupled with a form of physical closeness none of them quite notice. When the flowers start appearing from all the aggressive grabbing and shoving they’ve been doing, Harry snaps a picture out of spite, and the argument disappears in their awe.  
There are rules, of course, for the photographs. Nothing but the arms, and make it non-descriptive. And nothing that could give away Severus’s identity.

But then there are also touches and flowers and it’s all documented. Real.

Harry looks them over every time he’s not able to get to Severus – it makes him feel less alone.

_Year 7._

Harry forces the bezoar down Severus’s throat, then pours the solution Hermione presses into his shaking hand on the wound. It struggles to patch the skin back together, meanwhile Snape is just staring at him, pain in his eyes, choking on his own blood. His hands are clutching Harry’s arms, and the whole experience breaks Harry’s heart in a way he’s sure he’ll never recover from, not if Severus dies.  
He has not seen him for months. His skin was so empty it almost physically hurt looking at it most days.

“I love you,” He confesses to Severus furiously, blinking away his tears, just in case… he should know. He ignores Hermione’s surprised gasp. “Don’t you dare leave me alone, you bastard. There are so many places you haven’t touched me yet, so many flowers I want to see. I want to wear the signs of you until the end of my life.”  
Severus gives him memories, mouths “kiss me”, which Harry does, slowly, softly. Their first and last kiss. A quiet goodbye.

By the time Harry is in the forest, the flowers have appeared on his arms. Harry stares at them as Voldemort taunts him, stares at them as he casts his curse.  
It’s the last things he sees before the green darkness envelops him.

_Year 8._

Harry wakes up earlier and stares at Severus’s sleeping form, what’s visible from where the covers slipped away. He is positively tattooed all over with intricate little flowers, and Harry hungrily seeks out the spots where it seems to have started to fade. It must be about the hundreds time they made love, but he thinks he’ll never get tired of seeing the after-effects of their single-minded, possessive touches.  
Soon, he’ll wake Severus up, to tell him he looks beautiful, and he’ll see how much Severus doubts him until he glances on the evidence on his own body: how he’ll smile when he realises Harry means _you’re mine._

**Author's Note:**

> this fic has a wonderful, fantastic, touching and... quite hot counterpart now, from the exquisite hippocrates460. A missing scene or continuation, up for You to decide. But I promise it's worth reading. Go check it out! https://archiveofourown.org/works/18563353


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